News and Notes From Around Major League Baseball For The Severely Deranged

Chipper Celebrates His Big Night

Last night was a historic night at Turner Field as Braves third baseman Chipper Jones was scratched from the lineup with his 3,000th oblique injury. While taking batting practice, Chipper felt a familiar tug in between his stomach and his ribcage and knew that he had done something special. He informed the trainer and Manager Fredi Gonzalez about the accomplishment immediately and his name was removed from the lineup card. The capacity crowd of 35,000 people leaped to their feet when the lineup change was announced and Chipper was given a five-minute curtain call during which he pulled a hamstring muscle. After the game, Chipper’s entire oblique muscle was removed and sent to Cooperstown. “There are many moments that live forever in the minds of baseball fans, Hank Aaron’s 755 homerun, Pete Rose’s 4192 hit, Oliver Perez’ 10,000th wild pitch and now this moment,” said commissioner Bud Selig in a ceremony held in the Emergency Room at Atlanta’s Grady Hospital, “There is a new strained oblique muscle champion and his name is Chipper Jones!”

In other injury news, the Mets placed Jason Bay on the 15,000 day disabled list retroactive to 2004. Bay was diagnosed with a broken leg, three sprained fingers, a ruptured spleen, toxic megacolon, chimpanzee acne, male pattern baldness, mumps, gastroenteritis, Bogart-Bacall Syndrome, an ulcer, type 4 feline diabetes, colic and schizophrenia. Bay sustained all of these injuries crashing into the wall at Dodgers Stadium in a game last July. The Mets Medical Staff has ordered Bay to fly back and forth from the West Coast four times a day for the next month in order to improve his condition. Former Mets General Manager Omar Minaya responded to this latest setback by offering Bay a 5 year 100 million dollar extension. The Mets, unclear as to why a person who is no longer GM is making offers to players, responded by offering Bay a 7 year 140 million dollar extension. Mets GM Sandy Alderson said in an afternoon press conference that “As a major market team, we simply cannot be outbid by former employees who no longer run baseball teams.”

Yesterday, Oakland A’s GM Billy Beane signed 12 year old Little League sensation Ryan Murphy. Murphy had a .560 OBP in 132 at-bats for his Pony League team, The Shoprite Superstars and had a 1.230 OPS in all summer wiffleball games played between 14th and 18th Street in Columbus, Ohio. Murphy, a 5 foot 2 and 345 pound shortstop, is thought the team’s leadoff hitter of the future.

Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa debuted his new “lefty-killer” defense designed to neutralize the power hitting left-handed bats on the Phillies in St. Louis last night. The defense featured 3 second baseman, 2 first baseman and 11 rightfielders. LaRussa, a manager known for employing creative lineups and defenses, made history last week by deciding to use a designated hitter in games against other National League teams and batting Albert Pujols 2nd, 4th, 7th and 11th in the lineup.

The good news is Albert Pull Hose has raised his batting average to a clean .200, prompting the greatest manager in the storied history of major league baseball to contemplate rearranging his fluid line up. LaRussa, known for sprinkling his soupy pre-game pep talks with AA confessionals and salty stories about stray cats he has personally saved from a life of prostitution, is a genius. Who else but Tony could figure out that batting the pitcher eighth is a recipe for success?: No one, that’s who. And so Pull Hose will replace What’s His Name as the new leadoff hitter. Of course, this could change. Should Molina look especially frisky during batting practice, Tony will stare at his laptop for forty minutes and then decide that the slow, squat catcher might leg out infield hits. And because the D Backs would never expect the pitcher to bat clean-up, Tony will move Holiday to the ninth slot.

Of course, Cardinal Nation reacts to these brilliant maneuvers by reaching for their official Redbird bongs or equally officious personal pony kegs. The more cerebral fan prefers a Stan “The Man” morphine drip. I like to wash down peyote buttons with homemade walnut brandy. By the time Ryan Franklin desecrates the mound I’m Kafka on the couch, just another hallucinating beetle watching my hands sprout into hideous tentacles.

Another scathingly brilliant assessment, sir. This is the sort of thing that should be textbooks. Tony is a genius or so everyone tells me and the wisdom of the population as a whole should always be followed to the letter. I thought that when the end of the world happened back in 2008 they should have airlifted him into Goldman Sachs and let him take a stab at fixing the festering nightmare that was formerly known as the free market.

I remember watching Molina run to second base years back. He left sometime around the launch of Sputnik and slid headfirst somewhere around the time that Obama was elected. But, in all fairness, he did force me to singlehandedly throw my television set out of the window of my fifth story apartment. Something to do with Aaron Heilman throwing a breaking pitch that never broke. Tony said he should run to third base first, but Molina decided to use the traditional approach to scoring on a homerun.

I must admit that last night’s 15 run display gave my abused liver needed relief. Lance Berk-a-lot can still swing the bat, even if his defensive skills are slightly less slapstick than the recently departed Manny Ramirez. Actually, Manny was one of my favorite players. I don’t know if female hormones enhanced god-given hand speed. Regardless, his career numbers should eventually land him in the Hall. Maybe he’ll take his lumps and agree to wear a sun dress during the induction ceremony. As for what public humiliation Big Mac and Bonds should endure before entering the musty shadows of Cooperstown, I’ll leave that for Fox and Friends to figure out. Surely three pasty morons can concoct a real American solution, combining family values derogation with painful patriotic sucker punches. Perhaps Rush Limbaugh, “The Doctor-Shopper of Democracy”, could be on hand to bray corporate platitudes while Laura Ingram whips them with cold NRA steel. There, now that pays appropriate homage to professional baseball, Jesus and free market capitalism.

Speaking of Jesus, serious Cardinal fans took a very dim view of LaRussa and Pull Hose attending Glenn Beck’s DC revival/travesty. It’s hard to image why they’d take time away from a tight division race to hang around with charlatans and confused crackpots. Whatever their motivation, the Lord was not pleased. The Cards lost eight in a row, dashing any hopes of competing with the hot-hitting Reds.

We’ll see what happens in LA. I have my resume ready to fly through cyberspace if Tony gets flaky with the line-up. The team needs a hard-nosed fiction writer in the dugout. There’s no question that under my skipper-ship locker room ambience would change — and change dramatically. The aroma of smoke and high-dollar liquor would replace Tony’s sterile, scentless cocoon. And I’d fine players twenty grand for pointing at the sky after reaching any base safely. I’d find out soon enough how devout Pull Hose is after pocketing his fines and then spending them on cases of vintage Rothchild and/or Keith Richards memorabilia.

Wow! The LaRussa/Pujols Glenn Beck Bund is a new thing for me. Hadn’t heard that. I was under the impression that LaRussa was a crypto-communist vegan who was trying to fill the stomachs of St. Louis children with his particularly foul brand of “Trotskyite bat the pitcher 8th” poison. Good to see that Der Genius is pairing up with a great Americans and future lobotomy recipients like Beck. As for your boy Pull Hose, he seems to be everyones favorite citizen due to the fact that he is one of the rare people who can hit a baseball without a syringe hanging out of his backside. But fate is a cruel mistress and the American public tends to like people a lot less when they are making enough money to feed most of West Virginia for a month. We shall see if it makes it to Cooperstown or Valhalla.

I have spent the last four days getting beaten about the face, neck and chest with images of Troy Tulowitski trotting carelessly around the bases at Citi Field. He was something in the neighborhood of 19 for 16 in the series with 9 homeruns and 47,013 RBIs. Bob Gibson wouldn’t have stood for it, but that was along time ago and millionaires tend to be slightly more passive aggressive nowadays. At least my Metropolitans are beginning their September collapse early this year in order to satisfy the impatient fan base. Philosopher, former basketball player and perpetual nosebleeder Michael Ray Richardson summed it up perfectly when he spoke the words “Ship Be Sinkin'”. No truer words, sir.